Take command of a vast interstellar empire and safeguard your species from total extinction in a procedurally generated 3D galaxy (with the option to flatten it) from 1 System to 10,000+! Prove your species' ingenuity through a deep and intricate combat system where anything (from individual components on ships to the stars themselves)...

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"While the diplomacy leaves something to be desired, there's nothing like creating an army of thousands of ships and blowing up a star."

About This Game

Take command of a vast interstellar empire and safeguard your species from total extinction in a procedurally generated 3D galaxy (with the option to flatten it) from 1 System to 10,000+! Prove your species' ingenuity through a deep and intricate combat system where anything (from individual components on ships to the stars themselves) is a target of opportunity.

Twist other Empires into submitting to your galaxy-class wit with diplomacy and wheel-and-deal your way to supremacy.

Research new kinds of weapons, engines, shields, and more, all of which retain their unique benefits as the game progresses, with a research web whose contents are shuffled every game at your option.

Exploit interstellar phenomena such as asteroid belts and stars and exploit them for yourself or destroy them to deny your foes. Create and destroy new worlds through advanced technological research.

Match your strategy against up to 10 other opponents (online or LAN-linked). Save the game when dawn breaks and boot it back up at dusk. It isn't over until you say it is! Drop in and drop out at any point; disconnecting players will not disrupt the game!

Your weapons, your ships, your rules: Almost the entire game can be modified through Notepad! Easily add new models and particle effects to the game with “out-of-the-box” developer tools. Create new weapons in seconds; create new AIs through scripts! The Galaxy is yours!

Star Ruler is an RTS 4X of theoretically limitless scale and great strategic depth. A game could include over a thousand star systems if it's running on high-end hardware.

Graphics: Unsurprisingly, nothing too amazing (though the planets actually look pretty nice), but then at the scale most games of Star Ruler run, it should be considered something of a small miracle that there are as many objects rendered as there are. The UI is mainly just functional, nothing too pretty; it's not as intuitive as it could be and it can be hard to figure out what's going on even if you read the necessary literature, but it's nothing that can't be gotten used to.

Sound: Pretty standard space game fare. The soundtrack is decent enough, though a little light on tracks. Some notification sounds can be easy to miss or sound too much like other notifications.

Gameplay: This game has as deep a ship design element as one could hope for (like the creation of ships the size of star systems that shoot planet-sized asteroids, if one so wishes and has the means) as well as an interesting approach to tech trees which adds an element of chance to breakthroughs and branching. Unfortunately, the gameplay is usually too fast-paced to take full advantage of the ship design features and the pace of the game also negatively impacts the management of planets as well (an element that seemed fairly well done at first). Additionally, there seems to be an unresolved bug regarding energy weapons never cooling down, so avoiding those is recommended. Overall, however, the gameplay of Star Ruler feels a bit like Supreme Commander or Planetary Annihilation on the scale of a galactic 4X, albeit with a good deal more of untapped depth.

This reviewer gives Star Ruler: 7/10

Additional Note: The Galactic Armoury mod adds a fair amount of content to the game and is highly recommended. If I recall correctly, the developers themselves helped with the mod, so it's sort of an "official" expansion.

Despite the obvious fact this planet was made on a nearly non-existant budget it's pretty good for how small it is. And the size some of the maps can get to is damn impressive, just be prepared for your borders to become a grind zone for fleets that can range from where in the hundreds to the millions. Add in that literally everything can be destroyed, and you have chaos unending near the end.

Superb 3D space RTS. Like the civilization games if they were massize 3D space RTS with no size limits or unit caps. This game delivers a true 3D universe (with the option to flatten it to a 2D pane if that's the kind of map you want) with real time flight between stars and clusters. Sins of a Solar Empire meets Sid Meier's Civilization with extras that both games lack like 3D spaceflight along individually determined paths, real time civil management and custom unit construction.

Really a lovely game, proud to have it in my library. A recommended collectors item to buy on sale or even off if you have the spare cash and would appreciate sitting down to play something like this singleplayer sometime.

Unfortunately multiplayer is fairly dead and with Star Ruler 2 available for purchase now likely to stay that way. Still a very nice game for even just a few 100 hours of singleplayer. Star Ruler 2 going to be even better I hope and with people online.

This is the sort of thing I think of when I think of a honestly priced classic high quality PC video game.

A shame it hasn't been much more popular. Hopefully that would not ruin it as it seems to have much of the industry.

If you like Total Annihilation / Supreme Commander types of rolling economies - then this is the 4x for you.

Tired of the constant back and forth over a single star system on the edge of your territory? Simply destroy all the planets and the star they orbit and your problem is solved!

Don't like how looooong it takes to build those 1,000,000 kilometer long ships? Simply build a Ringworld around a super giant star! You can build fleets in the 1,000's in just seconds!

But wait! "Building that Ringworld is going to take too long!" Sure, while that might normally be true, all you need to do is build planetary thrusters on each of your planets and fly them all into a single system. Take that logistics!

+/+ Unique take on the 4x genre.+/+ Great technology tree.+/+ Infrastructure and starships receive updates with tech.+/+ Excellent starship construction options.+/+ Lots of options for how you set up the game.+/+ Well supported by developers (over 30 patches).

+/- Star Ruler is played in real time with pausing.+/- Micromanagement is handled by the A.I. by default.+/- Swarm style warfare.

Verdict: 7.8/10. Star Ruler is a very unique and deep 4x strategy game. It’s a great game, but as of writing this review, the sequel is being developed and looks to expand upon the strengths while fixing most of the weaknesses (such as the UI, fleets, and diplomacy). If you’re not a huge fan of the genre or can’t get it cheap, I’d wait for the sequel. That being said, this is a worthy game in its own right.

Before buying the game I ran across some reviews indicating that this is a 4X strategy game with a high level of complexity. Thats fine for me, after all that is what is intended to be for serious strategy 4X games.

But complexity needs the appropriate tools, interface and AI to work fine. Unfortunately this game lacks all of theme. Yes it is complex, but it turns out to become very chaotic in the end.

So you probably get fed up and let everything be managed by the AI. The AI governors will actually do a good job for you and the only thing left to do is designing ships (which is actually a cool part of the game), building theme into thousands with out any limitations and penalties and sending theme to massacres under a very aggressive AI which doesn't give you much choices than to go into meaningless chaotic wars.

Just curious, doesn't a ship have any maintenance expenses? And build by the thousands? It wouldn't be a problem managing such a large numbers of units, but you don't have the appropriate tools to do that or at least the ones provided are very poor.

Diplomacy is very poor, management of empire also poor and with out any perceptive, interface controllers and functions a bit strange and difficult to adjust even for experienced strategy gamers. The game also lacks a sense of personality, rather mediocre.

So finally in the end you have got this enormous in numbers ships and just send theme to battles, one after another, contentiously... ba ba doom booom... boring... still for some this might be enough and very entertaining.

On the other hand, graphs and layout are quite good, simple and minimal which in my aesthetic (and functionality) perspective is good. Music is also one of the best encountered in this genre of games, and the concept is fine but just stuck in the level of intentions.

Star Ruler is a very open-ended game. This supports modding very nicely and there are some wonderful mods out there for it, such as Galactic Armory. The blueprint design system lets you stop worrying about exactly how the ship is going to be put together and worry more about exactly what types of systems you want to install, and how much of them. There is almost no limit to how big a ship's scale can be, and everything is done on a beautifully simple relative ratio allowing you to take any ship design and rescale it easily. Research is well handled, while simple, it is also complicated with the possibility of randomizing links between different fields, resulting in completely unique paths to the future technologies per play. Unfortunately the game's multiplayer support is not up to snuff, so is difficult to play with others over the internet. LAN games appear to work fine however. One thing to note: Star ruler 2 is allready in development, so this game is pretty much solidly locked as it is. The original promises of expansion and update have come to fruit to a degree, and it's a wonderful game overall, but don't buy it for multiplayer unless you're going to game on a LAN.

Great game! BUT - it does seem like this game is getting robbed by a sequel - the game description claims that features are "currently" being expanded... but to all appearances its NOT, its just the old sales pitch, while the expanded feature development is implemented in a new game (sequel). Does "seem" a little dishonest... . If this changes, I'll change my review.

One of my absolute favourite space games of all times. Very open-ended, with a complex technology system that really lets you experiment with countless combinations and strageties. There is a learning curve on how best to design your ships for various purposes, and the AI is extremely difficult I find, but once you have it all down, it is a really rewarding and challenging game. I don't believe the game was fully finished, so there is something a bit unfinished about it, but the shear power and scale of the game make up for it with a little imagination.Considering the price, it's definitely worth picking up by any space 4X fans!

How have I spent over 100 hours on this game!? I don't even....I should go design another ship.

I personally like this but I caution buyers as this game may not be for everyone. The Masters of Orion/Sins of a Solar Empire junkies will probably be dissapointed. If tempted, definitely pick this game up when it's on sale.

A brilliant game. I play with the Galactic Armoury mod and absolutely love the game. There is a steep learning curve and some of the aspects of the game can be a little obscure and difficult to follow but, with potentially infinite maps (depends on how good your computer is) and almost limitless customisation of ships and stations I would rank this as one of my favourite games. Of course the fact that you can make ships that are bigger than the entire galaxy is a plus!

One of the detracting points for Star Ruler is the Diplomacy system but for Star Ruler 2 this is being completely overhauled.

On the whole I would recommend Star Ruler to anyone who is willing to take the time and put in the effort to learn an excellent game.

When it doesn't crash, it's a nice experience, but it crashes way too much. I recommend it cause overall it's a must-have for strategy gamers for its deep customization/traits system (you can even write the background of your alien species or make blueprints of your own ships). But seriously, it crashes way too much.

I'd highly encourage to follow Star Ruler 2 development, to see if all those issues will be addressed.

Star Ruler is the perfect example of an indie diamond in the rough. The core realtime 4x gameplay gives you a ton of freedom and ship design is fun and open, while the game progresses to eventually become really hectic. The customization and stuff isn't overdone to the point of being spergy like in some of these types of games. However, the game is pretty graphically poor, there being only two visually distinct sets of ship designs and everything being sort of par for the course budget indie space game graphics. The studio seems tiny though so can't really fault em that. A bigger issue is that the gameplay tends to degenerate into walling off a section of the map well enough that the AI can't bust through easily, and then beelining a ship of such a large scale none of the AIs can deal with it as it blows up planet and sun after planet and sun. The basic resource gameplay is realtime resource chain management sort of similar to Anno games, at which the AI has perfect micro - the difficulty setting seems to be what bonuses they get, and I couldn't find a difficulty at which I could have a back-and-forth fight with the AIs. Either I would crush them outright, fight them to a stalemate then win after two hours of turtling like outlined above, or get totally ♥♥♥♥♥. This game seems to have a lot of potential for multiplayer but there ain't nobody playin this obscure ♥♥♥ indie pile lol. With more dynamic and varied AI this could be great. The sequel will be something to look forward to, though I gotta say an expansion fixing some of this would be better, first.

It's a recommend if you dig stuff like Endless Space and Sins of a Solar Empire with a dash of Anno and a pinch of autism mixed in, then all the polish knocked off

One of my favorite games, hands down. Nearly 400 hours and still rising every so often. If you like having the ability to customize your ships in Galactic Civ II or something along those lines then this is the next step up. There (were) also some excellent mods, at least two total conversion mods that added tons of weapons and the like but unfortunately those have become outdated. I hear, however, that the modding is easy (relatively) so that is another plus if you like messing around with your games.

Unfortunately, it does have some problems though. I am not 100% certain the weapons are all balanced and the diplomacy system is... lacking.. to say the least, but I still very much enjoy playing and still do.

If you liked this game, you should check out the sequel they are working on!

This game is based around the idea of letting the player design their ships in a nearly open ended way. You can design and build swarms if microscopic ships all the way to solar system sized dreadnoughts. If you enjoy designing your own units to make your forces work in whatever way you choose, then this game is as good as it gets. Once you master designing ships with the vanilla game components it is time to look into mods that add hundreds of additional components.

You can build a death star like ship and one shot planets.I have played this game over 125 hours.

It has innovation and ambition, however the pieces don't come together. The gameplay is bogged down by too many vague systems and some implementations that just feel broken. I'd love to see another attempt with some of these ideas but I can't recommend this game.